New Hero: Malthael

Once the Aspect of Wisdom, Malthael abandoned heaven after the Worldstone’s
destruction. In secret, he had resolved to end the Eternal Conflict by
becoming a Reaper of Souls and eliminating everything affected by demonic
corruption, including humanity.

Trait

Reaper’s Mark

Basic Attacks afflict non-Structure targets with Reaper’s Mark for 4 seconds. Marked enemies are revealed and take damage equal to 2.5% of their maximum Health every second.

Basic Abilities

Soul Rip (Q)

Extract the souls of nearby enemies afflicted with Reaper’s Mark, dealing damage and Healing Malthael for a portion of the damage dealt to each target hit.

Heroic targets heal Malthael for an additional 3% of the Hero’s maximum Health.

User Interface

Holding SHIFT + left-clicking an Announcer, Banner, Emoji, Portrait, Spray, or Voice Line in your Collection will now create a chat link that directs other players to that item.

If an item does not have its own page, the link will open to the relevant category in the Collection with that item's title in the search bar.

Hero Select

A “Close to Leveling” sorting option has been added to non-draft Hero Select and the Profile’s Roster tab.

Use this sorting feature to quickly locate Heroes who require the least amount of XP in order to level-up.

When two or more Heroes are tied, those Heroes will be further sorted by release date.

Hotkeys

Force Move

A Force Move command has been added to the Basic Hotkeys menu.

When a Hero receives a Force Move command, they will move to the target point without attacking any units on the way or anything that was clicked when the command was issued.

Heroes who attack while moving, like Tracer, will continue to attack enemies during a Force Move command. However, while using these Heroes, Force Move commands will prevent players from clicking a new target or accidentally switching from the locked-on target.

Modifier Hotkeys

ALT, CTRL, and SHIFT can now be set as Modifiers for Basic Hotkeys (Q, W, E, R, Attack, Move, etc.).

Mastery Taunts

New Mastery Taunts have been added, and can be unlocked on a per-Hero basis by reaching Hero Levels 25, 50, 75, and 100 with that Hero.

Hero Levels that grant multiple progression rewards will no longer take up two or more slots in the Quest Log.

Instead, hovering the cursor over that slot will now display a tooltip that communicates all rewards granted upon reaching that level.

For example: Hovering the cursor over an upcoming Hero Level 10 reward will indicate that the player will receive 500 Gold and a Hero-Specific Loot Chest.

Ranked Play

General

Lessened personal rank adjustments in both Hero and Team Leagues, which will allow players’ ranks to move more quickly during win or loss streaks.

Team League

Team League matchmaking will now allow players to wait indefinitely until the system finds a reasonable match for their skill level.

When average queue times for 2-player parties in Team League become lengthy, the leaders from additional 2-player parties attempting to enter the queue will see a warning message that they may be in for a long wait.

When this occurs, the party leader can choose to enter the lengthy queue if they are willing to wait, or cancel the queue to find additional party members and get a match more quickly.

Design and Gameplay

General

Cooldowns for Abilities and Talents that can be toggled on and off have been unified to 0.5 seconds across the board. While most of these Abilities and Talents already had a 0.5 second delay, there were a few outliers, which have now been updated:

Anub'arak - Legion of Beetles (Active)

Thrall - Spell Shield (Active)

Murky - Never-Ending Murlocs (R)

Talents

Bolt of the Storm

Range reduced by 20%

New Bolt of the Storm alternatives have been added to several Heroes

Developer Comment: While we love Bolt of the Storm and the playmaking
potential that it provides, we believe that the talent is too often used as an
extra escape. We have also received feedback that Bolt of the Storm could have
more awesome moments if its playmaking potential were more tied to offensive
use cases. Our goals with these changes are twofold: to consolidate Bolt of
the Storm to heroes where we think it makes for awesome gameplay moments, and
second to create use cases where it is more optimal to use Bolt of the Storm
to make offensive plays. We hope that these changes create more interesting
moments in the late-game where heroes can shine by making risky plays to
ensure victory for their team.

Battlegrounds

Map Rotation Update

Thanks for sharing your Map Rotation feedback with us! As a result of community-driven discussions, we’re making all 13 Battlegrounds available for play in Versus A.I., Quick Match, and Unranked modes.

Hero and Team League are now the only game modes that will feature a Map Rotation.

The Ranked Map Rotation has been updated to include the following:

Hanamura

Dragon Shire

Tomb of the Spider Queen

Cursed Hollow

Infernal Shrines

Sky Temple

Braxis Holdout

Blackheart’s Bay

Battlefield of Eternity

A new Map Rotation icon has been added to the Ranked Play screen.

Hover the cursor over the Map Rotation icon to display a list of all Battlegrounds currently available in Ranked matchmaking.

Find the Map Rotation icon next to the Grand Master Leaderboard and Ranked Guide buttons.

Minions

Catapults

Can now slightly overlap with one another to help prevent them from becoming stuck against one another when multiple Catapults bunch up around a Core.

!Quest: Cast Chain Lightning on a hero. Dying or casting it on the same hero twice in a row resets progress.

Reward: Chain Lightning slows targets by 8%, stacking up to 40%.

!Quest: Reach a 40% bonus slow.

Reward: Chain Lightning deals 25% more damage to the primary target.

This quest never completes and will reset even at maximum stacks.

New Talent: Alpha Wolf (W)

Increases root duration from 1 to 1.5 seconds.

For 3 seconds after being hit by a Feral spirit, Thrall’s basic attacks deal 3% of the targets maximum health.

Level 20

Bolt of the Storm (Active)

Removed

Worldbreaker (R)

Decreases Cooldown from 70 to 50 seconds

New Functionality:

No Longer travels indefinitely

Creates a pathing blocker for 3 seconds

New Talent: Wind Rush (Active)

Activate to teleport to a target location and gain Windfury

70 second CD

Developer Comment: We started looking at Thrall for a talent update as
many of his talents were older generic talents, and Thrall ended up having a
clear build path. Our pillar for this update was creating more talent
diversity and unique ways to play. The changes to Feral Spirit add new
opportunities for Thrall to make big plays, while allowing him to continue his
role as a lane bully, or play with the team, depending on your playstyle.
Overall, Thrall is now flush with Quest talents, and this is something we
wanted to explore and are excited for your feedback.